HDescrip: Anti-modernist art critic and art historian.
Craven was born to Richard Price and Virgina Bates (Craven). Craven graduated from Kansas Wesleyan University in 1908, moving to Paris for a
time to study art. In France, Craven attempted to be as French as possible,
according to himself, in order to be an artist. However, Craven returned to
the United States settled in Greenwich Village and became acquainted with the
American realist artists working there. He roomed with the American painter Thomas
Hart Benton and was friends with objectivist painters John Stuart
Curry, George Grosz, Reginald Marsh and
Grant Wood. During World War I he served in the U.S. Navy in 1918 and afterward married the writer Aileen St. John-Brenon in1923 (divorced 1947).
During the late 1920's, Craven fell under the influence of H. L. Mencken,
publishing in Mencken's magazine The Mercury a 1927 article, "Have
Painters Minds?" Craven's animadversion of all painting--from murals to
portrait painting to still lives--caused a public fury. In 1931 Craven published his first and most influential
book, Men of Art. An art-historical survey of painting in the Western
world, it was a combination of social history, biography and description and
criticism. It and his later works were selected as Book-of-the-Month-Club
offerings, catapulting his anti-modernist taste to an even larger audience. Craven wrote numerous articles, essays, criticisms, and reviews for
Scribners, Harpers, The Dial, The Nation, The New
Republic and The Forum. He was art critic for the Hearst Paper in New
York, New York American. Craven also authored two other books, Modern
Art, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, and Greek Art. His papers are
housed in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Craven was characterized the "the principal ideologue of
the American Scene" movement by the art historian Matthew Baigell (q.v.). His
often caustic reviews and criticisms of the modernistic movement made him a
partisan of the conservative art movement. Somewhat visionary, however, he
championed as authentic art the works of cartoon artists and Walt Disney.

HBibliography: Men of Art. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931;
Modern Art: the Men, the Movements, the Meaning: New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1934; A Treasury of American Prints: a Selection of One hundred
Etchings and Lithographs by the Foremost Living American Artists. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1939; A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: from the
Renaissance to the Present Day. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939; Famous Artists and their Models.
New York: Pocket Books, 1949.